CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

He strutted over to a round black bin containing water and looked over the brim at his reflection.

Then he closed his eyes very quickly.

Then he opened them slowly.

It was true. He was a chicken. And not just any chicken. He was a Sultan—the worst, most foppish of all, fluffy, plushy chickens.

He gazed at himself in the water. He had pure white feathers, a red V-shaped comb that disappeared under a white crest nearly as ridiculously puffy as that of a Polish, feathery muffs, feathery shanks, blue legs, and five toed feet. If an eighteenth century Corinthian were transformed into a bird, it would be a Sultan.

Sultans were the foppiest of fops.

Stepping back from the water, Gaius sighed. Or at least, he tried to. Instead, he just made a kind of a rattling noise.

Well, it could have been worse, he thought cheerfully. He could have become a Silkie, which were practically puffballs, or a Shamo, which had such long necks that they looked like real-life versions of those stretchy rubber chicken.

But still, a Sultan?

Really, fate? Really?

A cold chill ran through his chickeny body as a new thought struck him, a disturbing thought. He knew very little of the darker side of the World of the Wise. The Cornish witches might be real, but they seemed like a different breed from the cheerful sorcerers he went to school with. Educated privately, passing their secrets from one to another, there was nothing to keep witches from straying into black magic, like the vicar in Rachel’s story—nothing to keep them from practicing their talents on their neighbors. In fact, he realized, a tingle slowly moving up his spine, they might be very bad people indeed—able to perform magic on a mundane population who had absolutely no ability to resist them.

No wonder the Wise called those without magic the Unwary.

If he only had brought his wand.

A frisson of fear nearly paralyzed him. Stuck as a chicken, he could neither play a harmonica nor cast cantrips—for he could neither speak nor make hand gestures. Had he had his wand, however, he would still have been able to use it, because the spells stored in a crystal could be activated by thought. Without it, he was as helpless as the Unwary.

Of course, if his wand had been on him when he was transformed, it might have gone the way of his peacoat and his wellies. So maybe it would not have saved him after all.

Some days, it sucked to be a sorcerer.

The little Frizzle had come up beside him. It tilted its head this way and then that. Never in his life had Gaius seen a chicken make such an intelligent-looking gesture. He glanced up at the glitter he had seen right before he transformed. Sure enough, it was the gem he had spotted when he was up on the ridge. Was that what had transformed him? He had seen the red mist that went with transformations come from that direction.

Had it transformed other people, too?

“Are you the little tacker who went missing from Clover Farm?” he asked the Frizzle.

Or he tried to ask.

Because what he actually said was: “Cock-a-doodle-do!”

Apparently, being transformed into a chicken did not give him any special chicken-speech powers, because the little Frizzle just stared blankly.

Either that, or it was just a chicken.

He looked around again and took two shuffling steps backwards, startled. The black rooster was back! Or, rather, it had grown big again. It cocked its head to the left, a nasty gleam in its eye. This was not good. A murderous monster was on the loose, and Gaius was the size of a rich lady’s lap dog and about as fuzzy.

But how had the black rooster grown big again?

Gaius looked around. The gigantic bird was standing right next to the food dispenser. The last thing he had seen before he lost sight of it up on the ridge was the bird pushing the red lever. Then it vanished—apparently because it had shrank to proper chicken-size.

If the red lever produced something that made a big chicken small, what did the green lever do?

The great black cock made its way across the enclosure, peering at the fowl. Chickens scattered before it, clucking in fear. Even the emu gave way.

Was it looking for him?

Ducking behind his fellow chickens, Gaius made his way over to the food dispenser. While the black rooster searched the area near his dropped bag, he pushed the green lever. A few grains of rice dropped into the bowl at the bottom.

Here goes nothing! Gaius pecked at them, swallowing two.

Suddenly, everything went back to its proper size. In fact, if anything, it was a tad smaller than usual. He looked down—still white and fluffy. Still a chicken.

Well, he could not have everything.

And if he did, where would he put it?

The black rooster slowly turned its head until its beady, black eyes were fixed on Gaius.

Oh, oh. That did not look good.

The other bird strutted back and forth, crowing, but Gaius could tell from the gleam in its eye that it would be coming for him soon. It was a magnificent-looking bird, in prime condition, and it knew how to fight. It backed up, lowering and extending its neck so that its entire body seemed to vanish behind its towering black cockscomb and razor-sharp beak, its neck ruff spreading out around this point of deadly danger like a feathery black shield. It was a pose Gaius had seen cocks take in the barnyard, usually while he was sprinting to get a bucket of water to throw on them in an effort to dissuade them from continuing. He liked to think of this stance as their “alien pose,” because when they stood like that, they sure did not look like earthly creatures. He wagered that if some TV show used roosters in this position for their monster-of-the-week, the majority of the audience would have no idea that they had just seen a chicken.

Looked more like a dinosaur. Or a